Letters: February 2010

It would seem that you only qualify EDUCATION as being acquired from a public
source. It was not that long ago that engineers were able to obtain licensure
with merely experience. Are those engineers/surveyors who obtained their
license from experience after meeting the minimum requirement and passing the
test the first time less qualified than the college graduates who took the same
test and passed it after the fifth try?

Yes, we all need to do a better job of training and preparing our technicians,
but I have more confidence in a technician with 12 years of field experience
than in a geomatics graduate with two years of experience. Also, the graduated
geomatics student has a very limited understanding of establishing or retracing
boundary lines, even after two years of experience. The few times that I have
been to court to testify for one side or the other, the argument has not been
about the measurement process or the understanding of it; it has been about the
placement of the boundary. That is where I feel surveying has been dumbed down.
Geomatics is more about the math and less about the boundary. Establishing the
boundary is the core of land surveying.

Kevin Douglas Hinkle, PLS
Alabama

I
just got through reading your article in the November 2009 issue of POB. I am 26 years old and have been in the land
surveying business since the summer of 2000. I have all of my endorsement forms
and am shooting to take the LSIT exam in April. It amazes me to see that 90
percent of the fellow surveyors I talk to do not understand the differences in
horizontal and grid data or that there is a difference between magnetic north
and grid north. Many don’t know what grid north really is and can’t convert
from tenths to inches. Here in Georgia,
a state where the headright system was once very popular, we come across so
many surveys that people assume coordinates on [or] do not check deeds to make
sure they set property lines and right of way lines up correctly. [They] just
plain only do enough to get by. The technologies are out there to help make
most of these things easy and common practice.

I thought being a professional meant that you do a professional job and look
out for your client as well as your profession. I am not sure how some of these
surveyors ever even get their license, and it really aggravates me that these
same surveyors are doing jobs for half or even less than half of what a company
who does a professional job charges. This leaves clients not only wondering why
the more-professional company is more expensive but also makes them wonder
whether surveying is really that complicated.

Why is it that as a young surveyor with no degree I can see these things going
on, yet many cannot? I believe it is because a lot of professionals are not
tutoring and mentoring the younger surveyors to do surveys the right way or
showing them the details behind why they are doing certain procedures.

I have been fortunate to work under two surveyors who care about their
profession and also care about passing on their knowledge to other people. I do
believe that requiring a degree would help weed out many of these
nonprofessionals; however, such a requirement would also weed out those people
that learn by hands-on training and who do have good mentors to lead them on
the right course. Something needs to be done about this “dumbing down of
surveyors,” as you call it, before it weeds out the professionals and we are
only left with the nonprofessionals that work for nothing and only do enough to
get by.

Degree or no degree, we will still face the same problems because new
technology “makes it so easy a caveman can do it.” Just because you can turn
the equipment on doesn’t mean you can survey with it or get the right data.
Anyway, it’s nice to see people are thinking about this subject.

Denver Youngblood
Georgia

Thank you, sir, for an excellent article on the lack of understanding for the
collecting, processing and analyzing of collected field data on the part of the
next generation of surveyors. I am most grateful to be old enough to have
learned my surveying (on a university level and through job experience) at a
time when “closing” a survey meant understanding latitudes and departures, trig
books and a whole host of geometric equations.

Today’s surveyors do not understand these things. They don’t understand how to
form a defensible opinion as to the location of a property corner, and they do
not understand how to turn inside angles and to add them up as a field check. I
don’t think most understand the real use of a plumb bob!

Our modern equipment brings us to an exciting new level of accuracy and speed.
However, if all of the batteries die, only a declining number of people are
still able to keep working.

John M. Hennemuth, PLS
Pennsylvania

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